Beware Icarus

Last Friday night, just as I was attempting to finish off a satisfying night of Quad parties with a nightcap in Adams House, I was stopped by the sight of two black couples in a blue sedan trying to park.

They were having trouble backing into the spot due to the row of cars backed-up behind them. It was not until the man riding shotgun got out of the car and shouted at the line of honking vehicles that most of them had pulled away. However, the car immediately behind them held its ground.

The obese white male behind the wheel of the ancient white Cadillac began to shout racist slurs both at the driver and the man standing in the parking space.

The situation got progressively confrontational to the point where I simply could not walk on by.

Soon after the white male started spouting racial invectives, two burly young Harvardians had emerged from the final club across the street to observe his antics.

Alcoholic beverages gripped firmly in hand, the two soaked in the scene like so many goons at a circus sideshow. They smirked, even chuckled to themselves.

Eventually I approached the white driver and politely asked him to move. However, I soon found this approach to be futile and resorted to language uncharacteristic of my usually mild-mannered nature.

Despite my voice of opposition, the white male's threats--both spoken and physical--intimidated the two black couples into complying. They left without being able to pull into the spot they had searched for. After all, what right did they have to park wherever they wanted?

The two couples fell victim to racism last Friday night. And it happened smack in the middle of campus at a spot you've probably passed a hundred times.

As an impassive observer, the best I could think to do in response to such overt prejudice was to turn to beer-toting Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum and remind them that those who stand and watch are just as guilty as the perpetrators of abusive acts. Their blank stares reminded me that there is work yet to be done in the hallowed halls of what many see as the top intellectual breeding ground in the nation.

When Bonnie Raitt spoke at Agassiz Theater last Friday as part of the Arts First week celebration, she trumpeted the Harvard she knew in the 1960s--a campus which thrived on activism and artistry, protest and politics, and above all else, awareness. What happened to that Harvard?

The same dry rot passivity that's eaten away at educational institutions across the country for the last two decades is finally beginning to crack the ivory tower. It is easy for us as students to claim immunity from social responsibility within the community. After all, we are just students here. We live in dorms; we don't live in Cambridge.

It's easy to talk about activism and equality in the classroom. It's harder to take it to the streets.

But once we enter the "real world" the burden of social justice descends and without prior experience we are liable to either crumble under its weight or refuse it outright. Beware students: beware Icarus, the boy who thought he could soar to the high heavens on flimsy wings.

"For the people in a small place, every event is a domestic event, they cannot see that they might be part of a chain of something," says Jamaica Kincaid.

Speak up now, because by tomorrow it may be too late.